City Council’s confirmation Tuesday night of two new Municipal Court judges capped off months of missteps by Trenton Mayor Tony Mack as he pursued an aborted strategy to appoint more judges to the court than state law permits.

In April, Mack was poised to name five judges to the bench when the state judicial system intervened, saying state law only permits the city to have four.

At the time, the administration said it would get approval from Mercer County Superior Court to make the appointments, arguing that additional judges were needed to reduce a backlog in the court.

The administration also sketched out a plan to turn two police stations closed as a result of budget cuts into new courtroom space.

Advertisement

Yet Mack abandoned that plan and dropped Debra J. Gelson from his slate of appointees instead.

Reached earlier this week, Gelson, a longtime substitute judge for municipal courts throughout the state, said she still didn’t know why Mack rescinded her appointment.

“I have not heard anything from the mayor’s office,” she said. “They have not contacted me.”

She also decried the fact that all the judges on the court are men.

“You have to have diversity on the bench,” she said.

The two appointees who ended up being confirmed by Council, Rodney Thompson and John F. McCarthy III, had their confirmation hearings held up earlier this month after Council President Kathy McBride voiced similar complaints.

Her concerns weren’t enough to stop their confirmations this time around, however. Only she and Councilman Zachary Chester voted against their nominations.

“The mayor never responded either way” to her concerns, McBride said.

The judges will serve three-year terms.

A series of requests made under the state’s Open Public Records Act also calls into question just how much planning the administration did before unveiling its proposal to expand the court’s size and open new courthouses.

A request to get copies of any internal city documents — including cost projections — related to the proposed police station conversions turned up nothing.

“The response from all contacted is that no such documents exists,” an employee with the city clerk’s office wrote in an email.

Nor has the city shared any written plans on the police station conversion or the proposal to increase the number of judges on the bench with the state Department of Community Affairs, which oversees the city’s finances and approves hiring decisions.

At the time, DCA defended the mayor’s aborted attempt to increase the number of judges on the bench — despite the fact that statistics compiled by the state judicial system show a precipitous drop in new cases filed with the court in the past year.

“We would argue the level of judges sought is a sound decision intended to expeditiously handle court matters,” a DCA spokeswoman said at the time.

Yet a request for internal DCA documents discussing the plan to increase the size of the court failed to turn up anything.

In response to questions about the type of discussions DCA had with Mack about his Municipal Court plans, spokeswoman Tammori Petty wrote in an email that “we have had several conversations with the Trenton Mayor and various members of Council who advocated hiring additional qualified and experienced judges.”

Mack didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Thompson and McCarthy now await DCA approval before they can take their seats on the court.